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PROLOG

       This  manual  page  is part of the POSIX Programmer's Manual.  The Linux implementation of
       this interface may differ (consult the corresponding Linux  manual  page  for  details  of
       Linux behavior), or the interface may not be implemented on Linux.

NAME

       od — dump files in various formats

SYNOPSIS

       od [−v] [−A address_base] [−j skip] [−N count] [−t type_string]...
           [file...]

       od [−bcdosx] [file] [[+]offset[.][b]]

DESCRIPTION

       The  od  utility shall write the contents of its input files to standard output in a user-
       specified format.

OPTIONS

       The od utility shall conform to the Base Definitions volume of POSIX.1‐2008, Section 12.2,
       Utility Syntax Guidelines, except that the order of presentation of the −t options and the
       −bcdosx options is significant.

       The following options shall be supported:

       −A address_base
                 Specify the input offset  base.  See  the  EXTENDED  DESCRIPTION  section.   The
                 application  shall  ensure that the address_base option-argument is a character.
                 The characters 'd', 'o', and 'x' specify that the offset base shall  be  written
                 in  decimal,  octal,  or  hexadecimal, respectively. The character 'n' specifies
                 that the offset shall not be written.

       −b        Interpret bytes in octal. This shall be equivalent to −t o1.

       −c        Interpret bytes as characters specified by the current setting of  the  LC_CTYPE
                 category. Certain non-graphic characters appear as C escapes: "NUL=\0", "BS=\b",
                 "FF=\f", "NL=\n", "CR=\r", "HT=\t"; others appear as 3-digit octal numbers.

       −d        Interpret words (two-byte units) in unsigned decimal. This shall  be  equivalent
                 to −t u2.

       −j skip   Jump  over skip bytes from the beginning of the input. The od utility shall read
                 or seek past the first skip bytes  in  the  concatenated  input  files.  If  the
                 combined  input  is  not  at least skip bytes long, the od utility shall write a
                 diagnostic message to standard error and exit with a non-zero exit status.

                 By default, the skip option-argument shall be interpreted as a  decimal  number.
                 With  a  leading  0x  or  0X,  the  offset shall be interpreted as a hexadecimal
                 number; otherwise, with a leading '0', the offset shall  be  interpreted  as  an
                 octal  number. Appending the character 'b', 'k', or 'm' to offset shall cause it
                 to be interpreted as a multiple of 512, 1024, or 1048576 bytes, respectively. If
                 the  skip  number is hexadecimal, any appended 'b' shall be considered to be the
                 final hexadecimal digit.

       −N count  Format no more than count bytes of input. By default, count shall be interpreted
                 as  a  decimal  number. With a leading 0x or 0X, count shall be interpreted as a
                 hexadecimal number; otherwise, with a leading '0', it shall be interpreted as an
                 octal  number.  If count bytes of input (after successfully skipping, if −j skip
                 is specified) are not available, it shall not be considered  an  error;  the  od
                 utility shall format the input that is available.

       −o        Interpret words (two-byte units) in octal. This shall be equivalent to −t o2.

       −s        Interpret  words (two-byte units) in signed decimal. This shall be equivalent to
                 −t d2.

       −t type_string
                 Specify one or more output types. See  the  EXTENDED  DESCRIPTION  section.  The
                 application  shall  ensure  that  the  type_string  option-argument  is a string
                 specifying the types to be used when writing the input data.  The  string  shall
                 consist of the type specification characters a, c, d, f, o, u, and x, specifying
                 named character, character, signed  decimal,  floating  point,  octal,  unsigned
                 decimal,  and hexadecimal, respectively. The type specification characters d, f,
                 o, u, and x can be  followed  by  an  optional  unsigned  decimal  integer  that
                 specifies  the  number of bytes to be transformed by each instance of the output
                 type. The type specification character f can be followed by an optional F, D, or
                 L  indicating  that  the  conversion should be applied to an item of type float,
                 double, or long double, respectively. The type specification characters d, o, u,
                 and  x  can  be  followed  by  an  optional  C,  S,  I, or L indicating that the
                 conversion should be applied to an item of  type  char,  short,  int,  or  long,
                 respectively. Multiple types can be concatenated within the same type_string and
                 multiple −t options can be specified. Output lines shall  be  written  for  each
                 type  specified  in  the  order  in  which the type specification characters are
                 specified.

       −v        Write all input data. Without the −v option, any  number  of  groups  of  output
                 lines,  which  would  be  identical to the immediately preceding group of output
                 lines (except for the byte offsets), shall be replaced with  a  line  containing
                 only an <asterisk> ('*').

       −x        Interpret  words  (two-byte  units)  in hexadecimal. This shall be equivalent to
                 −t x2.

       Multiple types can be specified by using  multiple  −bcdostx  options.  Output  lines  are
       written for each type specified in the order in which the types are specified.

OPERANDS

       The following operands shall be supported:

       file      A pathname of a file to be read. If no file operands are specified, the standard
                 input shall be used.

                 If there are no more than two operands, none of  the  −A,  −j,  −N,  −t,  or  −v
                 options  is  specified, and either of the following is true: the first character
                 of the last operand is a <plus-sign> ('+'), or there are two  operands  and  the
                 first  character  of  the  last  operand  is  numeric; the last operand shall be
                 interpreted as  an  offset  operand  on  XSI-conformant  systems.   Under  these
                 conditions,  the  results are unspecified on systems that are not XSI-conformant
                 systems.

       [+]offset[.][b]
                 The offset operand specifies  the  offset  in  the  file  where  dumping  is  to
                 commence.   This  operand  is  normally  interpreted  as octal bytes. If '.'  is
                 appended, the offset shall be interpreted in decimal. If 'b'  is  appended,  the
                 offset shall be interpreted in units of 512 bytes.

STDIN

       The standard input shall be used if no file operands are specified, and shall be used if a
       file operand is '−' and the implementation treats  the  '−'  as  meaning  standard  input.
       Otherwise, the standard input shall not be used.  See the INPUT FILES section.

INPUT FILES

       The input files can be any file type.

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES

       The following environment variables shall affect the execution of od:

       LANG      Provide a default value for the internationalization variables that are unset or
                 null.  (See  the  Base  Definitions  volume  of   POSIX.1‐2008,   Section   8.2,
                 Internationalization   Variables  for  the  precedence  of  internationalization
                 variables used to determine the values of locale categories.)

       LC_ALL    If set to a non-empty string  value,  override  the  values  of  all  the  other
                 internationalization variables.

       LC_CTYPE  Determine  the  locale for the interpretation of sequences of bytes of text data
                 as characters (for example, single-byte as opposed to multi-byte  characters  in
                 arguments and input files).

       LC_MESSAGES
                 Determine  the  locale  that should be used to affect the format and contents of
                 diagnostic messages written to standard error.

       LC_NUMERIC
                 Determine the locale  for  selecting  the  radix  character  used  when  writing
                 floating-point formatted output.

       NLSPATH   Determine the location of message catalogs for the processing of LC_MESSAGES.

ASYNCHRONOUS EVENTS

       Default.

STDOUT

       See the EXTENDED DESCRIPTION section.

STDERR

       The standard error shall be used only for diagnostic messages.

OUTPUT FILES

       None.

EXTENDED DESCRIPTION

       The  od  utility  shall copy sequentially each input file to standard output, transforming
       the input data according to the output types specified by the −t  option  or  the  −bcdosx
       options.  If no output type is specified, the default output shall be as if −t oS had been
       specified.

       The number of bytes transformed by the output type specifier c may be  variable  depending
       on the LC_CTYPE category.

       The  default  number  of  bytes  transformed  by  output type specifiers d, f, o, u, and x
       corresponds to the various C-language types as follows. If the c99 compiler is present  on
       the  system,  these  specifiers  shall  correspond  to  the  sizes used by default in that
       compiler. Otherwise, these sizes may vary among systems that conform to POSIX.1‐2008.

        *  For the type specifier characters d, o, u, and x, the default number  of  bytes  shall
           correspond  to  the  size  of  the underlying implementation's basic integer type. For
           these specifier characters, the implementation shall support values  of  the  optional
           number of bytes to be converted corresponding to the number of bytes in the C-language
           types char, short, int,  and  long.   These  numbers  can  also  be  specified  by  an
           application as the characters 'C', 'S', 'I', and 'L', respectively. The implementation
           shall also support the values 1, 2, 4, and 8, even if it provides no C-Language  types
           of  those  sizes.  The implementation shall support the decimal value corresponding to
           the C-language type long long.  The byte order used when interpreting  numeric  values
           is  implementation-defined,  but  shall correspond to the order in which a constant of
           the corresponding type is stored in memory on the system.

        *  For the type specifier character f, the default number of bytes  shall  correspond  to
           the  number  of  bytes  in  the  underlying  implementation's  basic  double precision
           floating-point data type. The implementation shall  support  values  of  the  optional
           number of bytes to be converted corresponding to the number of bytes in the C-language
           types float, double, and long double.  These numbers  can  also  be  specified  by  an
           application as the characters 'F', 'D', and 'L', respectively.

       The  type  specifier  character  a  specifies  that  bytes  shall  be interpreted as named
       characters  from  the  International  Reference  Version  (IRV)  of  the  ISO/IEC 646:1991
       standard.  Only  the least significant seven bits of each byte shall be used for this type
       specification. Bytes with the values listed in the following table shall be written  using
       the corresponding names for those characters.

                                     Table: Named Characters in od

                    ┌─────────────┬──────────────┬───────────────────┬──────────────┐
                    │Value   NameValue   NameValue     NameValue   Name │
                    ├─────────────┼──────────────┼───────────────────┼──────────────┤
                    │\000    nul  │ \001    soh  │ \002    stx       │ \003    etx  │
                    │\004    eot  │ \005    enq  │ \006    ack       │ \007    bel  │
                    │\010    bs   │ \011    ht   │ \012    lf or nl* │ \013    vt   │
                    │\014    ff   │ \015    cr   │ \016    so        │ \017    si   │
                    │\020    dle  │ \021    dc1  │ \022    dc2       │ \023    dc3  │
                    │\024    dc4  │ \025    nak  │ \026    syn       │ \027    etb  │
                    │\030    can  │ \031    em   │ \032    sub       │ \033    esc  │
                    │\034    fs   │ \035    gs   │ \036    rs        │ \037    us   │
                    │\040    sp   │ \177    del  │                   │              │
                    └─────────────┴──────────────┴───────────────────┴──────────────┘
       Note:     The "\012" value may be written either as lf or nl.

       The  type  specifier  character  c specifies that bytes shall be interpreted as characters
       specified by the current setting of the LC_CTYPE locale category. Characters listed in the
       table  in  the  Base  Definitions  volume of POSIX.1‐2008, Chapter 5, File Format Notation
       ('\\', '\a', '\b', '\f', '\n', '\r', '\t', '\v') shall be  written  as  the  corresponding
       escape  sequences,  except that <backslash> shall be written as a single <backslash> and a
       NUL shall be written as '\0'.  Other non-printable characters  shall  be  written  as  one
       three-digit  octal  number for each byte in the character. Printable multi-byte characters
       shall be written in the area corresponding to the first byte of the  character;  the  two-
       character  sequence "**" shall be written in the area corresponding to each remaining byte
       in the character, as an indication that the character is continued.  When  either  the  −j
       skip  or −N count option is specified along with the c type specifier, and this results in
       an attempt to start or finish in the middle of  a  multi-byte  character,  the  result  is
       implementation-defined.

       The  input  data shall be manipulated in blocks, where a block is defined as a multiple of
       the least common multiple of the number of  bytes  transformed  by  the  specified  output
       types.  If the least common multiple is greater than 16, the results are unspecified. Each
       input block shall be written as transformed by each output type, one per written line,  in
       the order that the output types were specified. If the input block size is larger than the
       number of bytes transformed by  the  output  type,  the  output  type  shall  sequentially
       transform  the  parts  of the input block, and the output from each of the transformations
       shall be separated by one or more <blank> characters.

       If, as a result of the specification of the −N option or end-of-file being reached on  the
       last  input  file,  input data only partially satisfies an output type, the input shall be
       extended sufficiently with null bytes to write the last byte of the input.

       Unless −A n is specified, the first output line produced for each  input  block  shall  be
       preceded  by  the  input  offset,  cumulative  across  input files, of the next byte to be
       written. The format of the input offset is unspecified; however, it shall not contain  any
       <blank>  characters,  shall  start at the first character of the output line, and shall be
       followed by one or more <blank> characters. In addition, the offset of the byte  following
       the  last  byte  written shall be written after all the input data has been processed, but
       shall not be followed by any <blank> characters.

       If no −A option is specified, the input offset base is unspecified.

EXIT STATUS

       The following exit values shall be returned:

        0    All input files were processed successfully.

       >0    An error occurred.

CONSEQUENCES OF ERRORS

       Default.

       The following sections are informative.

APPLICATION USAGE

       XSI-conformant applications are warned not to use filenames starting with '+' or  a  first
       operand  starting with a numeric character so that the old functionality can be maintained
       by implementations, unless they specify one of the −A, −j, or  −N  options.  To  guarantee
       that  one  of  these  filenames  is always interpreted as a filename, an application could
       always specify the address base format with the −A option.

EXAMPLES

       If a file containing 128 bytes with decimal values zero to 127, in  increasing  order,  is
       supplied as standard input to the command:

           od −A d −t a

       on  an  implementation  using  an  input  block  size  of  16  bytes, the standard output,
       independent of the current locale setting, would be similar to:

           0000000 nul soh stx etx eot enq ack bel  bs  ht  nl  vt  ff  cr  so  si
           0000016 dle dc1 dc2 dc3 dc4 nak syn etb can  em sub esc  fs  gs  rs  us
           0000032  sp   !   "   #   $   %   &   '   (   )   *   +   ,      .  /
           0000048   0   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   :   ;   <   =   >   ?
           0000064   @   A   B   C   D   E   F   G   H   I   J   K   L   M   N   O
           0000080   P   Q   R   S   T   U   V   W   X   Y   Z   [   \   ]   ^   _
           0000096   `   a   b   c   d   e   f   g   h   i   j   k   l   m   n   o
           0000112   p   q   r   s   t   u   v   w   x   y   z   {   |   }   ~ del
           0000128

       Note that this volume of POSIX.1‐2008 allows nl or lf to be  used  as  the  name  for  the
       ISO/IEC 646:1991  standard  IRV  character  with  decimal  value  10.  The  IRV names this
       character lf (line feed), but traditional implementations have referred to this  character
       as  newline  (nl)  and  the POSIX locale character set symbolic name for the corresponding
       character is a <newline>.

       The command:

           od −A o −t o2x2x −N 18

       on a system with 32-bit words and an implementation using an input block size of 16  bytes
       could write 18 bytes in approximately the following format:

           0000000 032056 031440 041123 042040 052516 044530 020043 031464
                     342e   3320   4253   4420   554e   4958   2023   3334
                        342e3320      42534420      554e4958      20233334
           0000020 032472
                     353a
                        353a0000
           0000022

       The command:

           od −A d −t f −t o4 −t x4 −N 24 −j 0x15

       on a system with 64-bit doubles (for example, IEEE Std 754‐1985 double precision floating-
       point format) would skip 21 bytes of input data and then write 24 bytes  in  approximately
       the following format:

           0000000    1.00000000000000e+00    1.57350000000000e+01
                   07774000000 00000000000 10013674121 35341217270
                      3ff00000    00000000    402f3851    eb851eb8
           0000016    1.40668230000000e+02
                   10030312542 04370303230
                      40619562    23e18698
           0000024

RATIONALE

       The  od  utility went through several names in early proposals, including hd, xd, and most
       recently hexdump.  There were several objections to all of these based  on  the  following
       reasons:

        *  The hd and xd names conflicted with historical utilities that behaved differently.

        *  The hexdump description was much more complex than needed for a simple dump utility.

        *  The  od  utility has been available on all historical implementations and there was no
           need to create a new name for a utility so similar to the historical od utility.

       The original reasons for not standardizing historical  od  were  also  fairly  widespread.
       Those  reasons are given below along with rationale explaining why the standard developers
       believe that this version does not suffer from the indicated problem:

        *  The BSD and System V versions of od have diverged, and the  intersection  of  features
           provided  by both does not meet the needs of the user community. In fact, the System V
           version only provides a mechanism for dumping  octal  bytes  and  shorts,  signed  and
           unsigned  decimal  shorts,  hexadecimal  shorts,  and  ASCII characters. BSD added the
           ability to dump floats, doubles, named ASCII characters, and  octal,  signed  decimal,
           unsigned  decimal,  and  hexadecimal  longs.  The version presented here provides more
           normalized forms for dumping bytes, shorts, ints, and longs in octal, signed  decimal,
           unsigned  decimal, and hexadecimal; float, double, and long double; and named ASCII as
           well as current locale characters.

        *  It would not be possible to come up with a compatible superset of the BSD and System V
           flags  that met the requirements of the standard developers. The historical default od
           output is the specified default output of this utility. None  of  the  option  letters
           chosen  for this version of od conflict with any of the options to historical versions
           of od.

        *  On systems with different sizes for short, int, and long, there was no way to ask  for
           dumps of ints, even in the BSD version. Because of the way options are named, the name
           space could not be extended to solve these problems. This is why  the  −t  option  was
           added  (with  type specifiers more closely matched to the printf() formats used in the
           rest of this volume of POSIX.1‐2008) and the optional field sizes were added to the d,
           f,  o,  u,  and  x  type  specifiers. It is also one of the reasons why the historical
           practice was not mandated as a required obsolescent form of  od.   (Although  the  old
           versions  of  od  are  not listed as an obsolescent form, implementations are urged to
           continue to recognize the older forms for several more years.) The a, c, f, o,  and  x
           types  match  the  meaning  of  the  corresponding format characters in the historical
           implementations of od except for the default sizes of  the  fields  converted.  The  d
           format  is  signed  in  this  volume  of  POSIX.1‐2008 to match the printf() notation.
           (Historical versions of od used d as a synonym for u in this  version.  The  System  V
           implementation  uses  s  for  signed  decimal; BSD uses i for signed decimal and s for
           null-terminated strings.) Other than d and u, all of the type specifiers match  format
           characters in the historical BSD version of od.

           The  sizes  of  the  C-language  types char, short, int, long, float, double, and long
           double are used even though it is recognized that there may be zero or more  than  one
           compiler for the C language on an implementation and that they may use different sizes
           for some of these types. (For example, one compiler might use 2 bytes shorts, 2  bytes
           ints,  and  4  bytes longs, while another compiler (or an option to the same compiler)
           uses 2 bytes shorts, 4 bytes ints, and 4 bytes longs.)  Nonetheless, there has to be a
           basic  size  known  by the implementation for these types, corresponding to the values
           reported by invocations of the getconf utility when called  with  system_var  operands
           {UCHAR_MAX}, {USHORT_MAX}, {UINT_MAX}, and {ULONG_MAX} for the types char, short, int,
           and long, respectively. There are similar constants required by  the  ISO C  standard,
           but  not  required  by  the System Interfaces volume of POSIX.1‐2008 or this volume of
           POSIX.1‐2008. They are {FLT_MANT_DIG}, {DBL_MANT_DIG},  and  {LDBL_MANT_DIG}  for  the
           types  float,  double,  and  long double, respectively. If the optional c99 utility is
           provided by the implementation and used as specified by this volume  of  POSIX.1‐2008,
           these  are  the  sizes  that  would  be  provided. If an option is used that specifies
           different sizes for these types, there is no guarantee that the od utility is able  to
           interpret binary data output by such a program correctly.

           This  volume  of  POSIX.1‐2008  requires  that  the numeric values of these lengths be
           recognized by the od utility and that symbolic  forms  also  be  recognized.  Thus,  a
           conforming  application  can  always  look  at an array of unsigned long data elements
           using od −t uL.

        *  The method of specifying the format for  the  address  field  based  on  specifying  a
           starting  offset  in  a  file  unnecessarily  tied the two together. The −A option now
           specifies the address base and the −S option specifies a starting offset.

        *  It  would  be  difficult  to  break  the  dependence  on  US  ASCII  to   achieve   an
           internationalized utility. It does not seem to be any harder for od to dump characters
           in the current locale than it is for the ed or sed l commands. The  c  type  specifier
           does  this  without  difficulty  and  is  completely  compatible  with  the historical
           implementations of the c format character when the current locale uses a  superset  of
           the  ISO/IEC 646:1991  standard  as  a  codeset.  The a type specifier (from the BSD a
           format character) was left as a portable  means  to  dump  ASCII  (or  more  correctly
           ISO/IEC 646:1991  standard  (IRV)) so that headers produced by pax could be deciphered
           even on systems that do not use the ISO/IEC 646:1991 standard as  a  subset  of  their
           base codeset.

       The  use of "**" as an indication of continuation of a multi-byte character in c specifier
       output  was  chosen  based  on  seeing  an  implementation  that  uses  this  method.  The
       continuation  bytes  have to be marked in a way that is not ambiguous with another single-
       byte or multi-byte character.

       An early proposal used −S and −n, respectively, for  the  −j  and  −N  options  eventually
       selected. These were changed to avoid conflicts with historical implementations.

       The  original  standard specified −t o2 as the default when no output type was given. This
       was changed to −t oS (the length of a short) to accommodate a supercomputer implementation
       that  historically  used 64 bits as its default (and that defined shorts as 64 bits). This
       change should not affect conforming applications. The requirement to support lengths of 1,
       2,  and  4  was added at the same time to address an historical implementation that had no
       two-byte data types in its C compiler.

       The use of a basic integer data type is intended to allow the implementation to  choose  a
       word size commonly used by applications on that architecture.

       Earlier  versions of this standard allowed for implementations with bytes other than eight
       bits, but this has been modified in this version.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

       All option and operand interfaces marked XSI may be removed in a future version.

SEE ALSO

       c99, sed

       The Base Definitions volume of POSIX.1‐2008, Chapter 5, File Format Notation,  Chapter  8,
       Environment Variables, Section 12.2, Utility Syntax Guidelines

COPYRIGHT

       Portions  of  this  text  are  reprinted  and  reproduced in electronic form from IEEE Std
       1003.1, 2013 Edition, Standard for Information Technology  --  Portable  Operating  System
       Interface  (POSIX),  The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 7, Copyright (C) 2013 by the
       Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc  and  The  Open  Group.   (This  is
       POSIX.1-2008  with  the  2013  Technical  Corrigendum  1  applied.)  In  the  event of any
       discrepancy between this version and the original IEEE and The Open  Group  Standard,  the
       original  IEEE  and The Open Group Standard is the referee document. The original Standard
       can be obtained online at http://www.unix.org/online.html .

       Any typographical or formatting errors that appear in this page are most  likely  to  have
       been  introduced  during  the conversion of the source files to man page format. To report
       such errors, see https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/reporting_bugs.html .